After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping. Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities. Most freed people lacked land or money and had to continue working for white plantation owners. Indeed, many plantations continued to run as large operations that were worked by wage-laborer’s or sharecroppers, including some poor rural whites. Sharecropping gradually became the accepted labor system in most of the South. Landowners, short of capital, favored the system because it did not require them to pay cash wages.
In the South, after the Civil War, many black families rented land from white owners and raised cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. In many cases, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At that time, the tenant and landlord or merchant would settle up, figuring out who owed whom and how much. Depending on the arrangement, the landowner may have provided the food, clothing, and medical expenses of the tenants and may have also supervised the work. The tenants’ payment to the owner was in the form of a share in the product, or in cash, or in a combination of both.
Different types of sharecropping have been practiced worldwide for centuries, but in the rural South, it was typically practiced by formerly enslaved people. With the southern economy in disarray after the abolition of slavery and the devastation of the Civil War, sharecropping enabled white landowners to reestablish a labor force, while giving freed Black people a means of subsistence. However, the system severely restricted the economic mobility of the laborers, leading to conflicts during the Reconstruction era.
During the final months of the Civil War, tens of thousands of freed slaves left their plantations to follow General William T. Sherman‘s victorious Union Army troops across Georgia and the Carolinas. In January 1865, in an effort to address the issues caused by this growing number of refugees, Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, a temporary plan granting each freed family 40 acres of land on the islands and coastal region of Georgia. The Union Army also donated some of its mules, unneeded for battle purposes, to the former slaves. Three months after the war ended, many freed African Americans saw the “40 acres and a mule” policy as proof that they would finally be able to work their own land after years of servitude. Owning land was the key to economic independence and autonomy. Instead, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, President Andrew Johnson ordered all land under federal control to be returned to its previous owners in the summer of 1865. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created to aid millions of former slaves in the postwar era, had to inform the freedmen and women that they could either sign labor contracts with planters or be evicted from the land they had occupied. Those who refused or resisted were eventually forced out by army troops.
Despite giving African Americans the rights of citizens, the federal government (and the Republican-controlled state governments formed during this phase of Reconstruction) took little concrete action to help freed Black people in the quest to own their own land. Instead of receiving wages for working an owner’s land—and having to submit to supervision and harsh discipline—most freedmen preferred to rent land for a fixed payment. Charges for the land, supplies, and housing were deducted from the sharecroppers’ portion of the harvest, often leaving them with substantial debt to the landowners in bad years. Sharecroppers received what was left if they were able to pay back the owners—generally about half of what had been produced under decent arrangements. A string of poor seasons or periods of low prices, coupled with the proliferation of unfair practices with little legal recourse, meant that many sharecroppers were held under the tacit bondage of economic insecurity.
Contracts between landowners and sharecroppers were typically harsh and restrictive. Many contracts forbade sharecroppers from saving cotton seeds from their harvest, forcing them to increase their debt by obtaining seeds from the landowner. Landowners also charged extremely high interest rates. Landowners often weighed harvested crops themselves, which presented further opportunities to deceive or extort sharecroppers. Immediately following the Civil War, financially distressed landowners could rent land to African American sharecroppers, secure their debt and labor, and then drive them away just before it was time to harvest the crops. Southern courts were unlikely to rule in favor of Black sharecroppers against white landowners. Consequently, high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord, or prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord.
Within years of Emancipation, discriminatory laws and lending practices largely barred Black people from land ownership: in Georgia in 1910, for example, more than 40 percent of white farmers were landowners, compared to just 7 percent of Black farmers, while more than 50 percent of Black farmers were sharecroppers or wage workers. Through sharecropping, white landowners hoarded the profits of Black workers’ agricultural labor, trapping them in poverty and debt for generations. Black people who challenged this system of domination faced threats, violence, and even murder. Whites violently attacked and murdered Black people attempting to form sharecroppers’ unions in communities throughout the South in the early 20th century, including in Elaine, Arkansas (1919); Camp Hill, Alabama (1931); and Lowndes County, Alabama (1935). This exploitation persisted as legal and political protections ignored the plight of Black workers. Through poll taxes, grandfather clauses, felon disenfranchisement, and violent intimidation, Black citizens were banned from the democratic process well into the 1960s, prevented from electing officials to represent their interests. Today, African Americans continue to grapple with the economic and political effects of the racialized exploitation that characterized the century following Emancipation.
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